March 25, 2013

On great photographs and their impact - An analyses

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

When many of us see
the anguish we have caused an “enemy” we feel not compassion or regret but annoyance.
The reaction is “why are you showing me that? Don’t you know it is their (the other’s)
own behavior that made us hurt them? It is
their own fault.” That we react this way
to the horrors we are capable of causing, is a sure sign that those same actions
have dehumanized us.

Part II - The
Pictures in Question

-- On 15 February
2013, The World Press Photo of the Year 2012 (pasted above) was made public. The winning image (selected from 103,481 photos
submitted by 5,666 photographers from 124 countries) was taken by Swedish photojournalist
Paul Hansen, working for the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The photo depicts
a funeral procession in the narrow streets of Gaza. Two men, visibly expressing
the emotions of anguish and anger, are leading the procession. They are carrying
the bodies of two-year old Sahaib Hijazi and her four-year old brother Muhammad.
Both children are wrapped in white shrouds. Both were killed when their house was
hit by an Israeli missile strike on 20 November 2012.

In making the
announcement of the winning image, Santiago Lyon, vice
president and director of photography for The Associated Press, said “a picture
should engage the head, the heart and the stomach....This picture for us on the
jury reached us on these three levels.” Winning the prize with such a photo brought
mixed emotions to Hansen, “I was very happy on one level, of course....And, I was
also very sad. It was a very sad situation.

-- On 15 November
2012, five days before Hansen’s photo was taken, another photograph showed up on
the front page of the Washington Post. This image showed Jihad Masharawi,
a Palestinian journalist resident in Gaza, in deep anguish as he holds the body
of his dead 11 month-old son killed when an Israeli bomb landed on their home. Mary
Ann Golon, the Post’s director of Photography, explained, “when we looked at the selection that night
of Middle East photos from the wire services, this photo got everyone in the gut...it
went straight to the heart, this sobbing man who just lost his baby son.” It should
also have spoken to the head, but for some of the Post’s readers, that was not the
case.

The fact that
this image found its way onto the front page of the Washington Post meant
that it was noticed by many more Americans than the Hansen photo. As a consequence
Zionist readers and organizations wrote to the paper’s ombudsman and the editors,
“protesting the photo as biased.” What they meant was that the Post should have
somehow made it clear that the Palestinians had “made the Israelis do this” by periodically
launching their small rockets into southern Israel. In other words, they wanted to know why the paper
had not “balanced the photo of the grieving [Palestinian] father with one of Israelis
who had lost a loved one from Gaza rocket fire.” The answer was that, as of that
date, there were no such victims in this round of fighting. “No Israeli had been
killed by Gaza rocket fire since Oct. 29, 2011, more than a year earlier.”

The Post readers
who complained were obviously ignorant of this fact. It is probably the case that
the Washington Post itself had done nothing to enlighten them about the asymmetric
nature of Israeli-Palestinian violence. However, even if the protesting readers
were aware of this factor, it might have made little difference. The grieving man
was a Palestinian and, in the eyes of the staunch supporters of Israel, that made
him responsible for his own grief. His enemy
status delegitimized his emotions and thereby undercut the legitimacy of the photograph.

-- As soon
as the Washington Post image appeared, the Israeli military started posting
images of wounded Israelis, particularly children. One emotionally moving photo
of a wounded baby also ended up on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s official Twitter account.

Thus began
a sort of contest of emotionally moving pictures. Which ones would be seen and move the largest
audience?

By virtue of
their superior firepower and readiness to use it the Israelis could not win this
contest. They simply were out there killing and maiming more people than the Palestinians
ever could. Thus it would be Palestinian
suffering that was bound to provide the most newsworthy pictures. This asymmetry was compounded by an apparent need,
on the part of some Israelis, to advertise their willingness to be brutal. And so, Israeli images that were at once threatening
and disturbing were posted on the internet.

-- For instance,
on 15 February 2013 an image was posted on Instagram, an image sharing website,
by an Israeli soldier, Mir Ostrovski, who apparently belongs to a “sniper unit.”
It shows the head and back of a Palestinian boy in the cross-hairs of a rifle. One
assumes it is Ostrovski’s rifle. The photo was commented upon by the organization Breaking Silence, which represents Israeli veterans critical of their government’s policies
toward the Palestinians. “This is what the occupation looks like,” the group wrote,
"[such] pictures are testaments to the abuse of power rooted in the military
control of another people.”

We can be pretty
sure that was not Ostrovski take on the situation. The head in the crosshairs, despite
its young age, was just an enemy.

Part III -
Conclusion

As a result the Zionist readers of the Washington
Post cry foul and speak of “bias.” It
would be better if they stopped complaining and tried to look at those images with
an “unbiased” mind.

Perhaps it
would help them do so, if they considered the words of Shylock in The Merchant
of Venice and their application to the Palestinian frame of mind.

If you prick
us, do we not bleed?...if you poison

us, do we not
die? And if you wrong us, shall we not

revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will

resemble you
in that....The villainy you

teach me, I
will execute, and it shall go hard but I

will better
the instruction.

The Israelis
and their supporters should look long and hard at those images that depict the consequences
of their own actions. They should think long
and hard on the fact that they pay for that action in kind. For it is primarily they, the stronger party,
who must overcome the barriers to compassion and regret.